Martin: No shortcuts to tackling sex abuse

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin warned today that there are no short-cuts to tackling the deepening scandals of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

The senior clergyman told Mass-goers he had rejected calls from some people to force victims of paedophile priests into a fast-track healing process.

“There is no short-cut in addressing the past,” Archbishop Martin said.

“The credibility of the Church in this diocese of Dublin will only be regained when we honestly recognise the failures of the past, whatever our share of responsibility for them.

“There can be no rewriting history. There is no way we should impose fast-track healing on those whose vulnerability was abused.”

The Church in Ireland and the Vatican have both been under mounting pressure in the last month after Primate of All-Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady admitted holding secret interviews with two young victims of one of the Church’s most heinous sex abusers, the late Brendan Smyth, in the 1970s.

Following that Pope Benedict faced claims he failed to properly investigate a serial abuser in a children’s home for the deaf in Wisconsin in the US in the late 1990s.

Cardinal Brady has faced calls for his resignation over the affair and said he would address the issue on Pentecost Sunday, May 23.

Archbishop Martin told a packed congregation at Holy Thursday Mass in St Mary‘s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin the Church’s response to paedophilia had been hopelessly inadequate.

“Shameful abuse took place within the Church of Christ. The response was hopelessly inadequate,” he said.

“I do not wish to give the impression that I want to go on forever hammering home a message of grief about the past, that I am obsessed with the past.

“Some ask me ’Can we not leave all that aside now, proclaim closure and move on?’

“I cannot agree. There can be no overlooking the past.”

Archbishop Martin, who has called for full accountability in the Church over child abuse, went on to tell the congregation that the mistakes of the past should not hold back Catholics.

“We have to address the past but we cannot become imprisoned in the past,” he said.

The clergyman also told Mass-goers Catholics could move forward and begin healing by bearing the wounds of the past.

“In that sense we must move forward, but we can only do so bearing within us the wounds of what has happened,” he said.

“Yet recognising our woundedness may indeed be our strength, if we witness more authentically to the Jesus who renounced all arrogance of power.”